The NRG was founded in 2004 by Daniel Marcus while working with Randy Buckner at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Washington University in St Louis. Soon after, it moved to the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at the Washington University School of Medicine. Our primary mission is to support biomedical imaging research, with a focus on neuroimaging. Our projects include software engineering, open access data sharing, and automated diagnostics. A foundation project in the lab is XNAT, an open source imaging informatics platform. XNAT and other NRG software are being used to support a number of projects at Washington University, including studies of Alzheimer’s Disease, neuro-oncology, and the Human Connectome, and at many other institutions across the country.
The NRG is a contributing member of the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN), an NIH-supported organization that is building distributed technologies for addressing informatics challenges, and the National Alliance for Medical Imaging Computing (NA-MIC). Dan and the lab are also part of the informatics team of the Human Connectome Project, a five-year NIH project that will map the functional and structural connections in healthy human brains.